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Faculty-Student Research

The Value of Faculty-Student Collaborative Research

A well-crafted research experience under the supervision of a faculty member can help students develop both professionally and personally, enhancing their skills of critical thinking, collaboration, ethical reasoning, civic agency, problem-solving, and much more.

Through URGO (the office of Undergraduate Research and Graduate Opportunity), students will find a host of semester and summer opportunities to engage in research with Augsburg faculty or through off-campus programs. Paid research opportunities are available on a competitive basis.

Guidelines

To fulfill the Augsburg Experience requirement, a research collaboration must involve:

  • Original student work
  • Considerable interaction with a faculty advisor (or other academic professional)
  • Presentation of research results at a public forum

To get started, students should express their interest to a faculty member or contact the URGO office.
During the semester in which students are completing their research, they should enroll in the 0-credit seminar AUG EX2 (a faculty signature is required.) At the completion of the experience, the faculty sponsor must verify with the Registrar’s Office that all requirements for an Augsburg Experience have been met.

Other Research Options

Course-Embedded Research

Departments may propose course-embedded faculty-student research experiences that will be part of, or linked to, an upper division course. Either individual or small-group work will qualify, as long as the students work with an off-campus partner and produce original scholarship. Faculty interested in developing course-embedded experiences should contact the Director of General Education for guidance.

Research with an Off-Campus Professional

Students may opt to complete their Augsburg Experience through off-campus research. In this case, the student must also have an Augsburg faculty sponsor who will supervise the work and ensure that all requirements are fulfilled. This research should result in a published technical report, conference paper, or a paper submitted to a scholarly journal. If the research does not result in one of these, the student must prepare a written report including a general summary of the disciplinary background, research methods, and findings, and present it to the faculty sponsor for evaluation. Students performing research off-campus are encouraged to make oral presentations of their work to members of the faculty sponsor’s department, and/or to local, regional, national, or international disciplinary conferences.

Departmental Honors and Independent Study Projects

In many cases, independent study projects or departmental honors projects may take the form of faculty-student research. To qualify for the Augsburg Experience, these projects should fulfill the three criteria outlined above. If a student wants to pursue AugEx credit, they must enroll in AUG EX2 during the semester in which they are completing the research and upon completion of the research and public presentation, and the faculty supervisor must contact the Registrar’s Office.

The Vision

“The main goals of the Augsburg Experience are to link the theoretical with the practical and to link the on-campus experience to the wider community. Faculty/student research provides students the opportunity to apply discipline-based knowledge and develop problem-solving skills with the support and under the supervision of an Augsburg faculty member [or other scholar/academic professional]. This research process provides both students and faculty the opportunity to engage in scholarly discovery, allowing for both success and failure. Faculty/student research designed as an Augsburg Experience project requires that the student interact with the wider academic community at any or all stages in the research enterprise. In some cases, the student will make connections to the wider community during or prior to the data-gathering phase. In other cases, students may be able to present their research results at regional, national, or even international conferences.”

– from “Augsburg Experience: Mission and Vision” (2002)